For the pre-show bloggers and press at the Home and Garden Expo!

 

 

 

 

 

It’s almost time for the Home Expo 2012.  It’s been a roller coaster ride again but I love it! Below are a few snapshots from the planning, the failures, the heart stopping moment and the final moment of finishing!

This was my first design for the Home and Garden Expo 2012, I am not a builder as such, I build because I like to texture and being part of the What Next Sim is amazingly awesome and at the same time a little scary, with talented designers such as Thistle Homes, Sway and Funky Junk as my neighbour (to name just a few) I thought I had better start early on sketching out a few ideas!

Note to self: when making things for a display check the sizes and then double check the size again! This build fits perfectly but it is the wrong orientation!!! The plot is 30m wide and 60m long NOT 60m wide and 30m long!

A bit of  tweaking later, coupled with a few swear words at myself I get it right the second time round :)

I wanted an open free moving environment but with nooks and cranny’s and lots of windows so I could hang up a billion curtain fabric displays!

There are two entrances, the reception room, where if it didn’t break copyright laws I would fill with design books and magazines!

The other room is our little gallery of textures with a small room for coats and an under the stairs nook hiding a few boxes of memories!  See the wall map – that’s something taken from an idea for our rl studio so I can at least dream of traveling the world!

The stairs lead up to a small grass filled deck to catch the last of the sun!

But one of my favourite parts is the studio.  I tired to pick out as many bits from my rl dream studio as I could fit in, a large work table, fabrics galore, tailors dummy and things that I love and inspire me (should have added my computer and wacom somewhere as they are my no 1 for what would you save if the house was on fire! ;)

There are key trends and themes from this year throughout the studio, have a bit of wanderlust then head over to the back of the studio for Aztec inspired fabric and fur textures or peek at the upcycle area for those that like to recycle with style!

In the picture below I get to work and look at Funky Junks beautiful home and live in a street with great designer neighbours!!!

 

It’s been fun, even through the near heart failure when I finished the whole build and had placed everything inside just perfect, took it into my inventory ready to nip over to the home and garden expo, only to find that it had disappeared!!!!

The keep calm and carry on motto appeared in my head, so as I headed to make a cuppa, restart Second Life a few times and sometimes magic happens…..back in the inventory :)

I’m off to make press release and blogger packs but keep an eye out tomorrow for a sneak peek at some of our brand new releases for the Expo (all of the money goes to charity).  Can’t wait….we released a crafty early look at one of our packs on our facebook page :)

Special credit to What Next for including us on there Home Expo sim, Pitsch Parx from UrbanizeD  and Vitrail Illios from New Trails for the fantastic landscaping.

Hope to see you there!

Whilst working on some patterns recently for iphone and laptop skins with a native American vibe, I thought it would be cool to rework a few ideas for an Aztec inspired texture collection.

Hand drawn patterns painted on canvas give the Summer Tribe textures a real artisan feel, in co ordinating colours and patterns, seamless (tip: play around with the scale to have large, statement prints or small scale repeat patterns) and the “ready to go” shaded set.

Drop by Insight Designs or shop online to grab a set of great textures!  We have everything from seamless wood and bricks to exclusive designed realistic fabric textures and wallpaper.  You can also catch up with us on our Facebook page and twitter :)

 

Undecorated Curiosity. Where decadence and glamour give way to decay and nostalgia.

Below you can find 2 free sample textures from the fantastic “Undecorated Curiosity Texture Pack” or click the link to visit Shop.insightdesigns.

Purchase Undecorated Curiosity

 

 

And don’t forget to keep up to date with all our textures on our Facebook Page or join us on Twitter :)

As always our free texture grabs are free for personal and commercial use.

Have a great weekend!

Spruce up Your Space brings us April Showers this month and we have an exclusive, a seamless collection of raindrops, rainclouds and a cute rainbow fabric texture pack.

Available this weekend at Insight Designs for less than $1! Don’t miss it :)

If you love home and decor check out the rest of the Spruce Up Your Space designers over at their flickr group, it’s a cracker this month!

Good morning.  It’s a bit grey outside today (perfect light for taking texture photos) so before I head out I want to thank Liz Ruest for posting her amazing images in our Flickr Group Texture Recipes and for sharing the way she created them. It’s always great to find fantastic textures but it’s also great to discover a little bit from behind the scenes.

Liz takes her texture recipes seriously and with great flair, colour and imagination. I love all the contrasts and details in the textures.

This one of my favourites built up from batik fabric, stone bricks, trees, leaves and moss between stones using various blend modes!

Visit Liz Ruest and her texture recipes over at Flick and take a peek at her blog for more insights into textures (Layers Of textures with threshold masks is one I will be checking out!)

If you have great textures and ideas to share, or questions on using textures, jump over to Texture Recipes. We’d love to see you there! :)

All images courtesy of Liz Ruest.

 

Ombre Plaster Textures – shaded and graduated in tones, a beautiful color effect where the color gradually changes from light to dark.  Our seamless Plaster Ombre Textures look great on walls, ceramic objects, pots and the shaded textures add an extra depth to your builds and look fantastic on sculpts and 3D modeling.

Available from Shop.InsightDesigns

Or stop by Insight designs Studio.

Keep an eye out for our Ombre Fabric Textures in Mocha, Graphite and forest green, for all our news and updates join us over at Facebook.

A great and quick way to add a fresh look to your photos, check out the before and after below and then catch the walk through and if you use a texture or two in your final image please add it to the flickr group Texture Recipes, a new group for sharing all texture ideas and treatments. :)

Open up your image in photoshop and crop, adjust if necessary,

Don’t worry about the colour fill layer in the image above its just to show how I cropped my image to focus on the items in the shot.

When you are happy with your image, duplicate the layer  (right click on the layer and click duplicate or drag your original layer to the new layer icon,

Next to add a subtle light source from the window by adding a  create a gradient layer,

In the layer palette click on the icon marked no.1 in the image above and click gradient. Another box will open, select a grey to transparent gradient and set the layer to divide 9% (try other layer modes such as lighten, each works slightly differently according to the background)

Next for a border, one of many ways – using the rectangular marquee too draw a rectangle around the edges, inverse the selection,(shift+ctrl+I) and on a new layer either create a colour layer or using the paintbucket fill the layer with white. Blur between 5 and 10%.

 

Now to make the image sing a little more! Here I  used a texture from our Sometimes I dream texture pack called Subtle Hint.

I placed this above the other layers and duplicated it, the bottom texture (no 1.) is set to divide 100% and the duplicated layer on the top (no.2) is set to overlay 50%

Above you can see the layer order with finally a logo grouped layer so I can easily move around our logo to fit any where on the image.

This technique and textures work great on other images to :

flickr group Texture Recipes

 

Happy Easter!

I was asked a couple of questions the other day, one was where do you get your inspiration from (I’ll talk more about that in an upcoming article – very exciting news) and in answering that I thought it might be kinda interesting to show you my work flow process from initial inspiration to final product, in this case my final product is going to be a photo  to show different ways of using our textures but it could have easily been either a  decorative egg cup planter  for Easter or a full permission sculpted egg pack with textures.

My inspiration came from Martha Stewards egg flower vases spotted over at STYLIZMO.  It’s absolutely beautiful idea, I love the slightly coloured egg shells and the spring flower bouquets.

Working along the same idea of egg shell vases I wanted to create a similar design but with insight designs unique style and textures so its time to start creating an egg cup and egg in a 3d program to export to secondlife.

If you don’t have access to programs such as Maya or can’t quite grasp Blender (a free modeling tool) take a look on the marketplace, there are some great sculpts available, ready made (note: if I was packaging this as a sculpted product then I would have baked the light and added shine to the egg cup)

Next I test the sculpts in second life, again if I had been making these as a final product to sell I would have completed all of the texturing and effects in Maya and Photoshop but as I like to experiment a lot with textures  I wanted to see if I could create  the ideas I had in my head like someone would who had purchased a premade sculpty pack.  This is a great way to add originality to brought sculpts by  adding different textures and seeing what works.  As you can see I wanted a bit more texture from my eggs than the original Martha Steward photo and I also wanted a more pottery handmade feel, like a found eggcup that had perhaps been left outside and was showing slight signs of age.

After trying several textures from our quite large range of plasters and weathered stucco I settled on two different packs.

1. The first one is a plain wall texture from faded dreams wall textures offset so the skirting and shading create added details around the rim and edges.

2. For the egg shell I used  different textures from the Mediterranean Breeze (stucco walls and plastered cement Textures) as well as being a great rustic egg shell texture with a slightly hand painted feel, by using the middle shadow of the texture  and offseting it to sit where the egg and egg cup meet it created a great realistic shading effect.

3. Experimenting a bit more with the Mediterranean Breeze textures on the egg cup, offsetting again  to give a variety of different looks!

close up:

 

If this was a final product then after all the texturing, building and boxing up comes the advertisement, again I took inspiration from the original photo and placed my egg cups in front of a window (one of the best bits about secondlife is the ability to make very quick sets and to adjust the daylight settings) Easy but very addictive!

A few shots later I ended up with a favourite:

Its a personal thing but I  highly recommend if you are creating an advertisement that you also include an image of your product without shadows (that does two things it shows how great your texturing is and that there is no misrepresenting of the product) or include a note to say that shadows were enabled and of course a real demo is the perfect solution.

The photo above is perfect for an ad,  just add all the info you need, such as logo, brand etc and you have a finished design from inspiration to a digital product!

For my purposes, of creating a photo  (my end product) I wanted to try to capture that light, chalky feel – spring like in essence.

So I opened up my sl snapshot in photoshop and with a few easy steps made the image pop a bit more, using a simple feathered border, gradient layer and our texture “Subtle Hint” from the fantastic Sometimes I dream Texture pack.  Be sure to check back tomorrow when I add the complete tutorial for boasting your images.

It’s been a fun day today working and  remember to keep adding your photos to our flick group – Second Life Interior Design.

Hope you all had a great Easter and I’ll be back tomorrow with the complete tutorial!

Textures and sculpts : Insight Designs (inworld)

Flowers : Arctic Greenhouse

 

 

 

Sometimes I Dream…….Soft grunge textures.

Size: 3600 x 3600 px (or 12.0″ x 12.0″)

Resolution: 300 ppi

Buy Now

 

 

Need a bit of colour inspiration, scratching your head at what colour to match your new designs.

I am a bit of a colour scheming freak and constantly collect and photograph great colour schemes but when I am stuck for ideas and need and bit of help and inspiration I check out the sites below,

First stop – Colour Lovers, a fantastic site with of wealth of colour schemes, ideas and inspiration.

Colour scheme designer A nifty little tool that will have you playing for hours! Great for choosing website/blog colours as you can preview your colour selection on an example website :)

Kuler – love exploring this place for beautiful colour combinations

Colr – Interesting site, play with colours and schemes by using photos. Below I uploaded one of my flower photos and I think it came up with an sweet colour palette.

Last but by no means least, one of the most popular places to get inspiration for colour schemes – design seeds

Any other favourite colour scheme ideas and inspiration sites?  I’d love to find more! :)

Tulips are out and I have an armful of flowers and a couple of free texture for this sunny weekend!  Either grab the textures and start “springing” up your images or take a moment to see my recipe below for Tiptoeing through the Tulip!

A CALL TO JOIN: We have started a brand new Flickr group called “Texture Recipes” a mix of fine textures with a pinch of great techniques! We want it to be a place to share you love and frustrations with textures and of course your favourite textured work.

We’ll be adding our own texture recipes and unique blends along with exciting creations and mash ups from some great texture artists!

We would love to see all of your work over there and share the love of creating texture recipes!

 

Texture Recipe: Flashbaking with Tulips

Step 1:

Open up the the soft “Flower Montage Texture”:

Step 2:

Snap a photo of any flowers, keep the background as plain as possible:

Place it in a seperate layer above the Flower Montage Texture, set to Hard Light 100%

Step 3:

To soften the tulips and the light a little, copy the Flower Montage Texture and place it above your layers, set to soft light 100%

Here you can adjust the hue, colour, saturation to your liking depending on your original photo or your style :)

Step 4:

I wanted to add a bit of splattering to keep with the painted, pastel feel…download the “ink splat” texture,

And again place above all of your other layers, I went for divide 48 % for a subtle hint:

 

Feel free to grab the tulip image and follow along or work to your own “recipe” as always our free texture grab are free for commercial and personal use (credit would be appreciated) and don’t forget to add your images to our new Flickr group “Texture Recipes” we would love to see you there and share the love by featuring some of the great artists out there :)

Create a modern and urban home, mixing concrete, exposed bricks and brick skirting.

Perfect for industrial interiors and also work great as classic exteriors for traditional homes.

With added depth and shading so your walls and floors don’t “float” but connect and work together to create a more realistic interior/exterior.  Seamless horizontally and also seamless vertically, so you can fully adjust the height of the bricks to create a border top and bottom, or offset the “plain” concrete textures to create a “dado” where the shadows meet…..completely versatile to suit your designs.

Check out our tips and guide, using these textures…….”texturing ideas”

Available now from shop.insightdesigns and from Insight Designs Studio.

 

 

 

All of our textures are “ready to go” but we like to make them as versatile as possible by creating seamless unique textures with added details and shading that you can play around with and create individual builds.

Below is a few snapshots of me playing, testing our latest texture pack – Concrete Intentions :)

The offset and repeats per face adjustments in the texture tab are great to play around with.

Tip: All our textures are coordinating, the colours and styles work together but they also can be “tinted” inworld to create whole new colours!

The Concrete Intentions texture pack is available from our online shop or inworld.

Floor and wood textures – Builders wood Textures by Insight Designs.

 

We encourage people to download* and use our textures in photoshop, gimp, maya etc to add your own details and shading :)

Play around with them, try them on pots and exteriors!

(terms and conditions apply)

 

Awesome designs this week you don’t want to miss, share the love by clicking on the links and pick up some great things for your home :)

MudHoney amazing Paper butterflies that I adore (there is also a wall decal available)!

CheekyPea mesh Birds on a wire is creative, cute and now I just have to find a plug socket ;)

La’Licious Designs beautiful table top Butterfly Atrium makes we want to be Alice in wonderland, I love it!

Cleo Design out door set inspired by butterflies

and our Chirp! Birdsong Textures

Insight Designs textures and also available from shop.insightdesigns

Check out all Spruce up Your Space releases and updates over at Second Spaces!

Chirp! Now in The Birdsong complete collection for Spruce up Your Space.

Cute illustrated chirpy birds with a dash of hand drawn dots and lines!  This set is perfect for interiors sets, with fabrics (shaded and seamless) and seamless wallpaper (with coving and skirting/baseboards) and not only are they available at a discounted price inworld but also from our online shop!  So if your looking for a cute twitter or blog background or you work in other worlds/3d modelling and fancy a bit of “Chirpiness”, for just $1, you can grab them this weekend (offer ends Monday 19th March) at Shop.Insightdesigns!

Also check out our Chirp! Twitter background!

 

Visit us at shop.insightdesigns or over at our store.
You can also keep up to date with all our releases and special offers including the free texture grab over at Facebook and Twitter!

With the weekend approaching fast, this week has flown by.  It’s been a busy week working on new children patterns and wallpaper (you can catch a sneak peek over at Pattern and Co.) as well as a few birdie designs for Spruce Up Your Space.

We are always excited to take part in Spruce Up Your Space and the theme this month Spread Your Wings!  And as Elle says over on her blog Second Spaces “It could be birds or planes or angels or butterflies or more! We’ve asked our designers to let their creative instincts soar!”

So I sat and doodled, that’s when I let my imagination soar and a few ideas later, a bit of a play in illustrator and photoshop and I’m almost there….just have to decide on fabric or wallpaper (or both!!!).  Find out and pick up the whole set on Saturday (17th March)

Sometimes inspiration doesn’t come so easily, then it’s time to watch:

See you at the weekend! and don’t forget you can catch up with all our releases over at our Facebook page!

A new part of the blog, The IT List, a weekly round up of five things I am loving right now…..in no order or reason other than I think they are great….what are you loving right now?

Y’s House is donating all of it’s proceeds for sale items at the *Y’s HOUSE* Cafe001 to Move for F of Japan (A fund‐raising campaign in SL for the Tohoku Region Pacific Coast Earthquake) so time to grab a great deal and help out a great cause.

Fantastic gacha chair (vespertine)

In limbo chairs by Gala Charron and poses by Flutter Memel

Fuzzy Bee Cat chair. There is also the cutest panda, giraffe and pig wooden chair, grab them here

and lastly a fantastic new blog for all your home and interiors Casa de smurf

Want to be on the IT List the first place I look for great designs is in our Interior Design flickr group, why not join us :)

Playing with….um…working with textures is fun!  Here’s a few really easy and quick ways of using textures to enhance your photos.

One of the things I snap all the time is flowers, so I grabbed a shot of a few tulips, and headed over to photoshop.

I used the Spirit of Spring Textures and placed them on seperate layers above my tulip image.  Layers are one of the simplest and easiest ways to adjust and change an image and if you make a mistake you can either undo (alt+ctrl+z) or turn off the layer (click on the eye icon in the layers palete)

I often work with multiple layers and textures, turning off and working on one at a time, adjusting the opacity and blend mode, building up the image, it’s a bit like having several layers of see through paper!

Above I used all three of the Spirit of Spring textures :

spring_1 (darken, opacity 31%)

spring_2 (soft light, opacity 100%)

spring_3 (overlay, opacity 87%)

Try it again with a different photo, change the blend mode, only use 2….it really is that easy!

Mouse over the image below to see the before and after.

 

How do you work with textures? Do you have a particular subject, like landscapes, flower, portraits that you like to work with?

 

 

 

Still daydreaming about spring……..we get little glimpses, snowdrops pushing through, the buds on the trees fattening up, the sun occasionally making a show!

The Spirit of spring is on its way!  In the meantime three free textures (for a limited period) from our newest texture pack coming soon.  It’s a great pack with soft overlays and spring overtones, keep an eye out on our Facebook Page for the release date of the larger, 300 dpi collection :)

Also if you’re new to textures check out how we created the tulip image above using the 3 textures below and different layers :)

Happy Sunday!

 

Finally the Daisy fabrics are all stitched up and ready to go!

Seamless and shaded with cute daisy patterns printed on a denim and canvas textile with stitched details and a hemmed edge.

Perfect for Easter!

Check out the contact sheets over at shop.insightdesigns for the complete collection or drop by Insight Designs :)

Spring is just around the corner, and with the new season comes brand new textures and patterns!  We’ve been really busy working on new designs and over the next few weeks we shall be preparing for the Home Expo as well as finishing up the daisy chain stitched fabric textures (due out next week) – cute and fun printed flowers on a canvas fabric with a hand stitched hem and edge!

I’m finding more and more of my surface pattern design is working it’s way into my fabric textures in particular so keep an eye out for the real fabrics!

For all our latest news join us over at Facebook and twitter!

Happy Sunday.

Just living is not enough… one must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower.  Hans Christian Anderson

Couldn’t agree more and although sunshine is unpredictable and freedom from everyday chores is not so easy to leave behind….a little flower (or two) is always possible :)

This weeks free texture grab Falling into Grace.

 

For the large sizes, simply right click on the textures and save image as :) No credit is required (but appreciated) and as always free for commercial and non-commercial use. The full TOS can be found here.

 

Missing traveling, exploring new places, discovering little stalls selling handmade fabrics and crafts. We’ll be back on the road soon but in the meantime…..to tide me over – Tribal Infusion Fabric Textures!

Hand made treasured fabrics, found in far away places or hidden away, carefully wrapped in the attic, loved and well looked after but with a hint of age.
Inspired  by African, Native American, and Aboriginal tribal patterns brought up to date with modern colours.  A little bohemian but also quite modern with a focus on handmade craftsmanship.  Rich and warm,  vibrant and colourful.

Seamless and shaded versions.

Available from Shop.Insight Designs and at Insight Designs (SL)

Below is a sample available from the pack, you can view the contents of the entire pack at Shop.Insight Designs

 

For those that don’t know there is a fantastic little tool called TinEye, rather than typing in words to find something you can enter an image! TinEye then trawls the internet and tries to find a match!

We all want to credit and link back to photos, textures and images that we blog, pin or use creatively, or that picture you downloaded a long time ago and have lost the original source for, just add the image to TinEye and find out where that image came from.

“It’s also great for researching or tracking the appearance of an image online, finding higher resolution versions of an image or for locating web pages that make use of an image you have created and for discovering modified or edited versions of an image.”

It’s not perfect but it’s growing each month, adding more images, certainly worth bookmarking and checking out the FAQ’s.